The myth of journalistic objectivism was started when the Democrats and Republicans got together (that was a long, long, time, ago, before I was born, let alone you, my child) and decided that from then on, every story would have exactly two sides, Democratic and Republican, neither more nor less, and that consequently they must be given equal emphasis, time, and credibility.

This was actually enshrined in law by the three networks of the day, but it all went to Hell immediately.

For one thing, objectivism is nothing like honesty, or accuracy, or truth. It is more like a kind of perverse blinkers that objectify truthiness by treating every statement, proposition, opinion, or ideology as equally valid and equally trivial.

As practiced during my youth, objectivity was a kind of consensual reality or conventional wisdom which could not be criticized or doubted by journalists, at least in public, or editors who disagreed with their publisher's editorial policy.

It was one of the stupidest things ever done and thus a vital part of American politics, media and journalism. It even worked its way into the media practices of other countries to some extent, but not so much that you couldn't tell an American news report from a Canadian, Australian or British one.

Now it has been replaced with Fox News, a viciously opiniated, ideologically-blinkered, ultra-partisan anti-objectivity where truthiness totally replaces even a passing acquaintance with truth, on one side, and every body else (which is to say the Main Stream Media, a Liberal Conspiracy that almost totally agrees with Fox News except on minor details, such as facts) on the other side. Outside of this pseudo-dichotomy is everybody who does not make over $1,000,000 a year for appearing on TV, minus the experts, who appear on TV for the Hell of it.

Clearly the requirement that "journalists" and "news" be objective, which is to say two-sided and perfectly balanced, has been lost. At Fox News (by which we almost always mean the Op Ed Pages of the Fox News Network, which actually still does fairly informative and accurate news reports BUT NOT ON TV OR CABLE, they have decided to take one side only and to do it to death, in a giantreductio ad absurdum et credo quia absurdum est. This side fits in nicely with Murdoch's policy of keeping his hands off of any editor or property who is just exactly like him in the minutest detail. Self-censorship is obligatory, all else is free because Murdoch is not paying for it.

This seems like rank hypocrisy since Murdoch is a vile little poisonous toad who will happily bite the hand that feeds him if he is feeling the least bit peckesh, but in reality, it is pretty much the way all the Evil Press Overlords have always acted. Murdoch is old school. By which I mean a Luciferian purveyor of Dark Satanic News Mills.

No wait, I'm wrong. The myth of journalistic objectivity was actually the journalistic face of the Nineteenth Century trend known as logical positivism. This was supposedly the ideological underpinning of scientific rigour. It was resolutely reductionist, phenominal and materialist, rational and fact-based. Except that it was no such thing.

Like Ayn Rand's Objectivism, logical positivism and journalistic objectivity are complete and utter bullshiat which are scientist, not scientific, objectifying not objective, and full of shiat.

My love of satire and humour (Mark Twain, Ambroise Bierce, Charles Hoy Fort, H.L. Mencken, MAD magazine, Steve Colbert, etc.) has led me to be extremely suspicious and derisive of claims of objectivity and to suspect any belief held in common by Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives, the Government and the Opposition, or any two persons whom you would not trust separately and individually. All is Maya, Delusion. Especially the news. The Buddha taught us that, or perhaps he meant to, but forgot because he had a lot of nothing on his mind.

The sad thing is that even good journalists are still taught, and still believe in, journalistic objectivity as a good, if not real, thing, as much as engineers and other jerks of that sort believe their professors on the first day of classes when the lying farkers tell them that they will be taught to think.

Teaching engineers that they are logical, rational, sane, etc., is a crime, very akin to telling them that they are consequently infallible and better than other people. Which is the lesson they really learn, the bastards.

These are just lies that professionals tell themselves and their clients. They sadly tend to believe them.

A complete contempt for journalists and editors plus connections and a certain ability to kiss ass will get you a job as publisher on any organ in Murdoch's God's Creation.

For example, the one thing I like about Lord Conrad Flack of Hackfarbour is his uttter seething hatred and contempt of journalists except for those who kiss his ass and hew to his party line, such as his lovely wife Babs did for 15 years before landing her trout.

In other words, Evil Press Overlords hate all journalists except dishonest, corrupt, and bad ones that agree with them.

If you really want to get permanently depressed listen to some c-span. You see both sides are equally idiotic and grandstanding. And the call in portion proves that the average voter can't be trusted to do anything as trivial as change their own tire much less form a rational opinion on the issues and candidates.

Only conservatives are media yellow journalist scrotums for political manipulation?

Because these, and another ten thousand outlets are all hide bound conservative news venues, owned by gazillionaires bent on securing a religious dictatorship which will outlaw San Francisco park nuidity and free Sandra Fluk contraception aids.

Magorn:OscarTamerz: And thankfully there's no left wing bias working to distort the facts in the main stream media or in the presidential debates.

[www.globalpost.com image 360x240]

and that's why we hate conservatives. Candy Crowley contradicted Romney with a FACT, and even then wimped out by offering him a "well you're correct in spirit" salve and you idiots STILL see that as evidence of horrible bias.

First... the guy I'm voting for wasn't there... just so that's clear.

Now... It was not a FACT. The President used the words "act of terror" in his Rose Garden speech... he did not call the attack an "act of terror"... which she said he did.

Also... it's not her place to fact check on the fly during a debate. Why? Because shiat like this happens.

I'm not claiming that this shows intentional bias... however... what Candy did was out of line and a serious breach of her responsibilities.

That's why we hate Liberals... any suggestion that someone even slightly to the left made a mistake... and you run around screaming with your fingers in your ears...

jimw:It seems as though there is yellow ____ (fill in the blank) everywhere these days. What ever happen to anti-trust and Monopoly laws? Airlines are now down to less than a handful of companies (other than regional). Same with oil companies. The majority of talk radio stations are owned by one company. You have to look hard for frozen food that is not owned by Nestlie (Swiss), chips, not owned by Frito-Lay, or bread, not owned by Bimbos(Mexican). Most eyeglass frames are made by one company who also owns most of the retail outlets and eye care insurance (Italian). When you go into a store you think you have a select but most are all owned by a few companies that fix the prices. Companies are now able to get laws passed to eliminate competition.

It all essentially began with the telecommunications act in the 1990s. It broke the restrictions on how many media outlets a corporation was allowed to hold. Over time the corporations bought out the independents and consolidated more and more of the market. The various corporations that own the news channels have interest/investment in other news corporations and/or their subsidiaries, or owner corporations, so there is basically an incestuous kinda thing going on where most channels a financial interest not to report certain stories. Add to that the ideas of corporate profitability you have today's mess.

Watch the unedited video that little ultra conservative turd made of the former NPR president? not sure what his position was-anyway his view point of the current media situation is pretty grim, and he has alot of interesting things to say. No more investigative journalism, no more foreign bureaus, ect.

The most depressing thing about this thread, though, is the wanna be hard ass cynicism about how "there never was unbiased journalism, dude". Maybe not completely unbiased, no, but there were many journalists that had ethical standards that they had to adhere to. Now that's gone and we've got a bunch of nitwits who expect journalism to be corrupt and biased as a matter of course.

So guess what, I worked at the Union-Tribune for over two years... ten years ago. I've since moved to Los Angeles and vowed never to return except to watch the Padres and Chargers lose at home. Even without the U-T, San Diego is a conservative blemish along the otherwise liberal west coast, with plenty of active and retired military to constantly scream "just bomb those towel heads" and plenty of elderly windbags who always find something to complain about or just stare at disapprovingly. Even if you ride out into east county, you'll just get the poorer, dumber version who think the decreasing value of their two bedroom ramshackle house on the edges of Spring Valley is all Obama's fault. If it wasn't for the large Hispanic population and 75,000 screaming college students... that city would look and feel like another Santa Barbara.So many terrible memories of being in the wrong place: After the 2000 election debacle, they put Bush' picture on the front page claiming most polls pointed to him as the winner, then defended it saying their headline didn't actually declare a victory. The printers represented the last of the unions and protested encroachment by sending trucks to circle the building while the department heads were sitting in their office pointing and laughing at their own employees the whole time. That fat ass Copley boy who ran the paper at the time had a morning ritual of going into the cafeteria, grabbing a couple of doughnuts out of the display case with his bare hands, and then would leave without paying or even saying hello to the staff he was taking from every damn day. At one point, someone faxed a copy of the Reader article detailing his most recent drunk driving arrest as a reminder of the asshat we worked for.Despite all of this drama, the worst I've heard has been the from the past year. They decided to turn the top floor into a museum... for newspapers? Of course not! Customized luxury cars... cars that cost 30 to 50 times the yearly $30,000 salary your average journalist makes in a city where even rent will cost you half that. All this right wing nonsense is just the tip of the iceberg... these bastards have an agenda to make San Diego even more of a conservative nutcase storage area.

OscarTamerz:And thankfully there's no left wing bias working to distort the facts in the main stream media or in the presidential debates.

What did she distort? One person claimed a statement was not made at a specific point, another claimed it was. Neither would budge. She ended it by pointing out that the transcript of the event showed that the statement was indeed made.She put a dispute to rest by stating a verifiable fact, and matter or record. Thats what a moderator does. That was a statement of fact. That is not partisan, nor coming in on anyone's 'side'.

That this is considered by conservatives to be 'biased' or 'partisan', simply because the facts are inconvenient, shows precisely how far away from truth and reality that particular ideology has moved in recent years.

brantgoose:The myth of journalistic objectivism was started when the Democrats and Republicans got together (that was a long, long, time, ago, before I was born, let alone you, my child) and decided that from then on, every story would have exactly two sides, Democratic and Republican, neither more nor less, and that consequently they must be given equal emphasis, time, and credibility.

This was actually enshrined in law by the three networks of the day, but it all went to Hell immediately.

For one thing, objectivism is nothing like honesty, or accuracy, or truth. It is more like a kind of perverse blinkers that objectify truthiness by treating every statement, proposition, opinion, or ideology as equally valid and equally trivial.

As practiced during my youth, objectivity was a kind of consensual reality or conventional wisdom which could not be criticized or doubted by journalists, at least in public, or editors who disagreed with their publisher's editorial policy.

It was one of the stupidest things ever done and thus a vital part of American politics, media and journalism. It even worked its way into the media practices of other countries to some extent, but not so much that you couldn't tell an American news report from a Canadian, Australian or British one.

Now it has been replaced with Fox News, a viciously opiniated, ideologically-blinkered, ultra-partisan anti-objectivity where truthiness totally replaces even a passing acquaintance with truth, on one side, and every body else (which is to say the Main Stream Media, a Liberal Conspiracy that almost totally agrees with Fox News except on minor details, such as facts) on the other side. Outside of this pseudo-dichotomy is everybody who does not make over $1,000,000 a year for appearing on TV, minus the experts, who appear on TV for the Hell of it.

Clearly the requirement that "journalists" and "news" be objective, which is to say two-sided and perfectly balanced, has been lost. At Fox News (by which we almost always mean the Op Ed Pages of the Fox News Network, which actually still does fairly informative and accurate news reports BUT NOT ON TV OR CABLE, they have decided to take one side only and to do it to death, in a giant reductio ad absurdum et credo quia absurdum est. This side fits in nicely with Murdoch's policy of keeping his hands off of any editor or property who is just exactly like him in the minutest detail. Self-censorship is obligatory, all else is free because Murdoch is not paying for it.

This seems like rank hypocrisy since Murdoch is a vile little poisonous toad who will happily bite the hand that feeds him if he is feeling the least bit peckesh, but in reality, it is pretty much the way all the Evil Press Overlords have always acted. Murdoch is old school. By which I mean a Luciferian purveyor of Dark Satanic News Mills.

No wait, I'm wrong. The myth of journalistic objectivity was actually the journalistic face of the Nineteenth Century trend known as logical positivism. This was supposedly the ideological underpinning of scientific rigour. It was resolutely reductionist, phenominal and materialist, rational and fact-based. Except that it was no such thing.

Like Ayn Rand's Objectivism, logical positivism and journalistic objectivity are complete and utter bullshiat which are scientist, not scientific, objectifying not objective, and full of shiat.

My love of satire and humour (Mark Twain, Ambroise Bierce, Charles Hoy Fort, H.L. Mencken, MAD magazine, Steve Colbert, etc.) has led me to be extremely suspicious and derisive of claims of objectivity and to suspect any belief held in common by Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives, the Government and the Opposition, or any two persons whom you would not trust separately and individually. All is Maya, Delusion. Especially the news. The Buddha taught us that, or perhaps he meant to, but forgot because he had a lot of nothing on his mind.

The sad thing is that even good journalists are still taught, and still believe in, journalistic objectivity as a good, if not real, thing, as much as engineers and other jerks of that sort believe their professors on the first day of classes when the lying farkers tell them that they will be taught to think.

Teaching engineers that they are logical, rational, sane, etc., is a crime, very akin to telling them that they are consequently infallible and better than other people. Which is the lesson they really learn, the bastards.

These are just lies that professionals tell themselves and their clients. They sadly tend to believe them.

A complete contempt for journalists and editors plus connections and a certain ability to kiss ass will get you a job as publisher on any organ in Murdoch's God's Creation.

For example, the one thing I like about Lord Conrad Flack of Hackfarbour is his uttter seething hatred and contempt of journalists except for those who kiss his ass and hew to his party line, such as his lovely wife Babs did for 15 years before landing her trout.

In other words, Evil Press Overlords hate all journalists except dishonest, corrupt, and bad ones that agree with them.

I like you, and this was a great post, but wtf on engineers?I mean my husband is aero, and one of the only honest, non-ass kissing government workers you'll find. He's personally saved taxpayers millions and millions of dollars, and is helping to bring technology to government operations. In a sensible and ordered manner. Yes, it's been an uphill battle all the way, from local podunk politics all the way to the pentagon. But his systems WORK. Made a data cube program, for storing all Navy logistics, then made a test lab, and now he's the leader of PEMA, getting laptops to sailors and soldiers and all the places in between. He had to basically write Navy protocol, and oh how much do some want a piece of that pie. Standardization of Navair devices, with a failure swap-out policy that puts most services to shame.I brag, cuz he never will.I'm proud of my engineer.Why u no like engineers, brantgoose?

There may have never been any real objectivity, but years ago at least, people knew that they were supposed to try. Now, nobody even hides their bias. It's like ethics, at least people used to realize that they were a good thing.

I thought this type of crankery was limited to blogs and youtube comments.

The editorial page named Obama the worst U.S. president and predicted a second term will result in "Arab terror states" attacking Israel, "death panels" rationing health care, income tax rates between 60 and 70 percent for many Californians and an attempt to get taxpayers to pay for late-term abortions. It warned of an effort to erase "In God We Trust" from U.S. currency.

Are you suggesting that this site's owner has become the very type of person that he vilified in his much promoted book? If only there were some sort of tag that could fully describe that type of ironic situation....

The big difference, it seems to me anyway, is the RMS owned a small and widely disrepected newspaper in a larger market that was served by other papers. Much like the Rev. Moon's Washington Times was the laughed-at also ran in a market dominated by the Washington Post. But in this case, one guy owns two rival newspapers, the ONLY two in the media market. that's ..not good.

brantgoose:My love of satire and humour (Mark Twain, Ambroise Bierce, Charles Hoy Fort, H.L. Mencken, MAD magazine, Steve Colbert, etc.) has led me to be extremely suspicious and derisive of claims of objectivity and to suspect any belief held in common by Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives, the Government and the Opposition, or any two persons whom you would not trust separately and individually. All is Maya, Delusion. Especially the news. The Buddha taught us that, or perhaps he meant to, but forgot because he had a lot of nothing on his mind.